Katie
Skelly knows her way around exploitation: what to show, who not to
cover up, where to put the accents, when to be bold and how much of
each. Her 2012 debut graphic novel,Nurse Nurse, was a tease in
all the best ways, a goofy nitrous high of see through strips held
together by a barely there narrative, but the charm, oh, the charm.
Skelly’s characters possess all the pathos of Shultz’s Peanuts with
the charisma of a Daniel Clowes or a James Kochalka
oddball. Operation Margarine sees Skelly pin the
needle to the right and give a throaty roar of a creator in full.

The
lives of bad good girl Margarine (sounds like bombazine or aubergine)
and bad ass Bon-Bon have become dead ends, or worse, cul-de-sacs.
Margarine is a society gal (Claudette Colbert in It Happened
One Night wearing Mia Farrow’s pixie cut from Rosemary’s
Baby) fresh from a recent breakout from a psych ward, Bellefrew.
Bon-Bon bears the scars of too many bad relationships with other
women’s men, she steals, favors black leather biker jackets and
alcohol. Margarine and Bon-Bon want the same thing: escape. Their
problem is neither one knows where nor what they’re escaping to.

Operation
Margarine plays
like Skelly’s riff on truth or dare, expect ‘dare’ is the only
option. For Margarine and Bon-Bon, truth (especially the past) is a
fink, painful, messy and best put in the rearview mirror. When
Margarine asks Bon-Bon, "So,
where you from?"
the response she gets says a lot, "Marge,
I have an idea. Let's skip this part. Let's just be ... new
people."
In other words, 'nuff said. The motorcycles they ride, the
clothes they wear and cigarettes they smoke act as signifiers, these
girls are bad, sure, but they’re not drawn that way; those peter
pan collars don’t lie.

Skelly’s
work is a study in deceptive simplicity. From her line to her writing
and from her character development to her panel composition, all of
it aims to exploit the reader’s expectations, to write off a lack
of realism for a lack of depth. To read a Katie Skelly comic is to
pay attention to small details. As austere as each panel may be each
one contains all the information the reader needs and nothing less.
Skelly’s neatness and orderliness is her tell. Like her characters,
Skelly seems to say, ‘go on, underestimate me, I dare you.’ Like
the man sez, “the
sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.”

Skelly’s
art of deception comes correct in her cartooning. To maintain
appearances, Margarine’s blond urchin cut offsets Bon-Bon’s black
bouffant, dark and light, good and bad, a binary pair if there ever
was one. This kind of black and white dichotomy gives Skelly a unique
way to use and exploit her B&W comic to her full advantage. After
an ambush and an octane-fueled flight from the heterochromia
iridum Billy and her gang, the ‘Faces of Death,’
Margarine and Bon-Bon cool their boot heals around a campfire under a
star filled desert sky.

In
all Operation Margarine’s one-hundred-and-four
pages, this is the one moment Skelly chooses to draw as a full page,
a silent character study of peaceful repose. Margarine’s eyes close
as she takes a drag on her cigarette. She supports herself with her
left arm, her posture is open. She wears her leather jacket like a
wrap, a society girl through and through. Opposite Margarine,
Bon-Bon, holds her cigarette away from her body, her big eyes narrow
on the campfire smoke and the stars in the sky. She sits with her
legs curled up (coiled) in front of her and slings a leather clad arm
around her body like a black iron bar. She looks as hospitable as a
rattlesnake. Such a simple and serene image, so quiet and yet Skelly
makes it thunder with heartfelt and complex emotions of these
seemingly clichéd characters.

In the following page, Skelly
drops the black-and-white-good-girl-bad-girl aesthetic and everything
becomes a bit more … transparent. Except for two small square
panels in the upper left (scorecards of who’s who), Skelly turns
Margarine and Bon-Bon into blanks, outlines. Margarine, always the
naïf (at this point, at least), says, “I’ve never been in the
desert before.” Bon-Bon responds, “only one thing to know
about it … there’s nowhere to hide.”

The
combination of Bon-Bon’s words with the composition of the page and
that final panel mark Skelly as a master cartoonist and storyteller.
She provides all the portent and foreboding of a horror movie as she
dwarfs Margarine and Bon-Bon at the bottom of the frame to make them
look small in the midst of a cold, dark and uncaring universe. And
then there’s the second half of Bon-Bon’s sentence -- the
‘there’s nowhere to hide’ part -- which provides an
extra little turn of the screw and acts as the knockout punch to the
wind up of the facing page with all its perceived serenity. Troubled
and in trouble: Bon-Bon and Margarine laid bare. This is the style of
delicacy, drama and dread with which Skelly operates in Operation
Margarine, all of it in one (not so) simple panel.

In Nurse
Nurse and Agent
8 --
an erotic web-comic at Slutist.com --
Skelly sugars off her love of Barbarella and
other trashy genre-specific kitsch to create something singular,
something very Skelly. She’s less an imitator and more a
genre-stylist; innovative and comfortable in the cottony familiarity
of genre. Yes, Operation
Margarine is
about two wayward wanton women who ride motorcycles through the
desert in search of satisfaction if not solace and should Skelly want
to ape such exploitive fare like Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! she
will, but Operation
Margarine ain’t
it. Still, it’s fun and to mix and Skelly sure as hell accessorizes
like it’s going out of style.

As
her podcast, Trash
Twins,
with Sarah Horrocks makes plain, Skelly is familiar with the
high-brow notions of low-brow culture. Again, Skelly shows herself to
be a ‘playa’ when it comes to genre tropes, exploitations of
exploitations. In Operation
Margarine’sinevitable
showdown scene, Bon-Bon and Margarine are met by the book’s big
bad, Billy, or at least her long legs.

This
gunslinger stance, one lone duelist framed by the forked legs of
another, is a trope in and of itself. Skelly plays off this ‘Western’
iconography, yes, but as seen through the lens of the ‘bad girls
lost in the desert’ storyline and Skelly’s love for the
exploitation genre, this image also riffs off of a similar showdown
from Russ Meyers’s “belted, booted and buckled”
masterpiece,Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

There
are more than a few throw-down/show-downs in Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and all of them frame up the physical
assets of the three leads, especially the iconic Varla played by the
even more iconic Tura Satana. When Varla and Rosie (Haji) confront
the old man (Stuart Lancaster), Meyer foregrounds his lead’s
backsides like twin colossi in black denim. Their prominence in the
foreground squeezes the small frail handicapped hermit and his big
dumb son as well as the frame itself. It’s clear who has both the
upper hand and who draws the camera eye. For what it’s worth, Meyer
cuts to this same shot (the exact composition) six times in less than
two minutes, always heavy-handed, always the pervert.

Like
Meyer, Skelly exploits the iconography to make it her own. The long
legs and short skirt of the dangerous Billy frame the smaller and
less powerful Bon-Bon and Margarine. Billy becomes a Goliath; so much
so her upper body doesn’t even fit in the frame. To this point in
the story Billy has only been the threat of a knife. Now Skelly pulls
that knife and shows it to her heroes. Whereas Varla and Rosie were
the intimidators in F,P!K!K!, Skelly subverts the
subversion and makes her heroes the demure and defenseless ones. This
intimidating image calls back to Bon-Bon and Margarine in the desert
being crushed by an unfeeling universe except now that menace sports
thigh-high black boots. A killer figure for sure. Once a knife like
Billy gets pulled, someone has to die and someone has to live to tell
the tale.

For
all its female empowerment, Operation Margarine has
balls in more ways than one. All in all, it’s a coming out party
with Margarine as its débutante. She’s the object of
the title and the story. But it’s the ‘operation’ or in this
case, the operator, Bon-Bon, where the story and Margarine get their
strength. Like her namesake, Bon-Bon has a hard shell, but she’s
soft(er) on the inside. She looks out for Margarine. She is her
protector, her champion and in a way, Margarine’s (re)maker and
creator. Katie Skelly is a Bon-Bon. She knows to create, no matter
the medium or the raw materials, means to let go. At the end
of Operation Margarine Bon-Bon lets go, she has to,
and so too does Skelly. Ride on, Margarine, ride on.